Pipo X8 showcased, a mini PC with a built in touchscreen display. Why? Because they can!

The Pipo X8 seems like another one of these design exercises. Unlike any other Windows mini PC on the market, the X8 comes with an actual display on-board which also acts as a touchscreen. Basically, it is up to you to call it either a sort-of-portable but tethered desktop (notice I’m not using the word ‘tablet’ here — there’s no batteries in the X8) or a mini PC that needs a larger display and other components to be fully usable.

If this does take off, it’ll most certainly be so because of the ‘unique’ touchscreen display which is a 7-inch panel with a 1024 x 600 pixel display. Apart from that, the Pipo X8 is pretty much your run-of-the-mill mini PC; there’ll either be an Intel Atom Z3735F or an Atom Z3736F Bay Trail powering the system, along with 2GB of RAM, and 32/64GB of on-board storage apart from 4x USB ports, microSD slot, WiFi and Bluetooth.

As Liliputing points out, there’ll be a speaker built-in which is a handy addition. It’ll ship with

Windows 8.1 with Bing, and a dual-boot variant with Android might be introduced in the future. There’s no word on pricing as yet, but looking at other similar mini PCs around, this one should cost around the US$150 mark.

An alternate approach (he also mentions that in the video) at looking at the Pipo X8 could be that the makers find fitting an LCD cheaper than buying a Windows license — Windows is, after all, free for devices with a screen smaller than 9 inches!